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Comment by incognos | Hacker News Reader

Human greed will lead to human extinction. It is a foregone conclusion, too many would rather die owning the latest iphone or latests trends than care about the global whole. You see it all around us, between the Congo, Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine and so much more... we just don't give a shit.

In summary, we are the architects of our own demise. (this is not pessimism, but realism)

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To be honest, no company wants to lower their income. This is institutionalised (i.e. the stock holders will throw you out if you decide to lower the income)

That's why they are selling us new cars instead of converting the old ones to electric or semi- electric drive. The amount of CO2 emitted on the new car creation and shipping is tremendous. The same with phones, washing machines etc. And now AI. It should be done on optimising (the software, the reliability), not creating new and throwing out the old ones

Extinction means zero humans left, which is highly unlikely as we are a very resilient species. A global collapse is more likely sometime in the future, but even then some countries and communities might just keep going on.

Probably what the dinosaurs thought too... an asteroid made the planet unlivable and they are gone now. We are making our planet unlivable bit by bit. My entire life is built around seeing patterns, and this is a pattern i cannot unsee. The only thing that could potentially extend our stay is the low birth rates, for which we can thank portal media devices and social media.

Utter nonsense. This is not realism. This is your weird negative way of looking at the world.

A lot of European countries are now generating most of their electricity from renewables, and it's being built out rapidly. We can now produce grid-scale storage at lower and cheaper prices. In places like Texas, this is happening at a breakneck speed.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?source=to...

Also developing countries are adopting solar panels and batteries at a surprisingly fast pace, since they just buy them for cheap from China rather than waiting for a dysfunctional government to build out a proper grid to rural villages.

I am an American living in Europe and yes they do generate their electricity from renewables but they also use an inordinate amount of diesel. So much so that the air is hardly breathable around Paris and other major metropolitan cities. Europ eis "cleaner" than the US but Europ eis hardly the greatest offender in terms of climate pollution.

Eventually of course this must be true, but eventually is a very long time and thus not susceptible of reasonable analysis.

I think a realist would likely imagine a long period of suffering and confusion rather than extinction (which is actually a sort of psychic panacea).

I agree with this assessment. But the end result is likely the same. Suffering is definitely the pre-cursor to extinction.

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